Losers, throwin' down

And now it's time for another update in that wildly popular Blob feature, The Battle for the Cel--

("Oooh, no. No, no-no-no-no-no," you're saying.)

--lar, in which the Blob's cruddy Pittsburgh Pir--

("STOP IT! Just STOP IT!")

--ates have reached new levels of stupendous cruddiness, settling in a  comfortable 3 1/2 games behind the not-quite-as-cruddy Reds, with a 47-61 record that includes losses in ni--

("La-la-la-la-la, I'm not listening, I'm not listening!")

--ne of their last 10 games.

So they're solidly winning the Battle, with two months left in the season. And they can fight, too!

Also throw at people's heads, which accounts for the fighting.

It seems Our Lads and those scurvy Reds don't like each other much, perhaps because each sees their own innate cruddiness reflected in the other. And so, because they don't play baseball very well, and because Our Lads, again, like to throw at people's heads, they got into another bench-clearing brawl the other night.

Of course, "bench-clearing brawl" does not have quite the same meaning in baseball as it does in, say, hockey. This bench-clearing brawl, for instance, followed all the basic tenets of baseball fights: Two or three combatant wading into one another, and everyone else sort of milling around pulling guys off other guys and trying to look involved while actually just trying not to get hurt.

Still, Major Baseball League takes a dim view of this sort of thing. Which is why it handed down 40 games of suspensions for the latest fracas, led by Pirates pitcher Keone Kela, who got 10 games for (do we really need to repeat this?) throwing at the Reds' Derek Dietrich's head. Pirate teammate Jose Osuna got five games and Bucs manager Clint Hurdle got two, which suggest MLB thinks Our Lads instigated the whole thing, even though the Reds have (or had) Yasiel Puig.

The Blob's totally unbiased take on this is that Joe Torre, MLB's head suspension-hander-outer, likes Cincinnati more than he likes Pittsburgh. Maybe it's the Hudepohl beer.

In any case, the Blob cries foul. Do not disagree.

I'll throw at your head.